Disc Priest -10man - Haste V Mastery

After struggling to get people to show up we have begun to raid fireland's a few weeks ago. The question I am wondering is whether or not more haste is better then mastery at the moment? I know mastery stacks poorly with DA, but up until now I have been strictly stacking mastery. I usually find myself at about 5%-10% mana left at the end of a fight. I always try to be completely out at the end of a fight. If I decided to go to haste, is there a soft cap/ overall cap I should be going for? I am worried that if I switch to haste, that I am going to blow through mana too quickly. I have seen many comments going both ways and lately I have seen many disc pirest favoring haste. Just trying to decide how it would affect me in my current gear.

I run with 2 sets of gear (some duplicates like Molten Front gloves from vendor) and switch mastery heavy and haste heavy depending on fights. As a general rule I'd go:

Haste for Shannox: If you're a smiter, you can atone heal the Shannox tank and barely use anything else. If you're not, it's still better than mastery unless you're having problems in last phase.
Mastery for Bethtilac: The burn phase can be long and brutal if you just started. The extra absorbs from PoH Spam (specially if you have a mastery trinket like moonwell chalice) are invaluable.
Mastery for Ryolith: Iffy here, but I guess I've found mastery more useful to pre-PoH the flame stomps.
Mastery for Alysrazor: The reignite phase has some juicy aoe damage, and with less haste you're less prone to heal your tank too fast and not get rid of the wound from chickens.
Haste for Baleroc: Mastery is useless in this fight in my opinion.
Mastery for Majordomo: Scorpion phase, my divine aegis can reach 35% of my healing done.
Haste for Ragnaros: I've found mastery to be lackluster since tank damage is so spiky, but then again I haven't downed his last 40% yet.

if you're mostly healing with PoH go for haste because that has a greater affect on PoH than mastery.

At the expense of mana. Mastery stacking provides the same benefit for the same mana efficiency. Besides, Mastery>Crit will give you an edge in aoe fights over Haste>Mastery>Crit, since you'll have a better chance to pop a double DA.

At the expense of mana. Mastery stacking provides the same benefit for the same mana efficiency. Besides, Mastery>Crit will give you an edge in aoe fights over Haste>Mastery>Crit, since you'll have a better chance to pop a double DA.

It's small benefits, but it all adds up for me.

Stacking mastery benefits shield, which is also "at the expense of mana", and to a greater extent than increasing your haste on gear.

Crit> Mastery gives you a bitter chance to pop double DA, haste is the king stat for Discipline. Because in aoe fights as you said, people take damage more than once. Having them live to survive multiple casts is better than a trickle of a shield increase that a sneeze doesn't even get absorbed through.

And if you're worried about running OoM, well... stop playing terribly?

And if you're worried about running OoM, well... stop playing terribly?

Maybe he's undergeared? While going for haste is not going to instantly empty his mana bar, I think a mastery set will help him towards preservation, giving him similar throughput at no mana sacrifice.

He also stated he's starting in Firelands after a long hiatus from his guild. Chances are, a 0.1 sec faster GH or PoH is not going to make or break an encounter until he's out of normal modes, while 10% additional absorb might passively make the encounters easier.

OP: Something that jumps out at me in your logs is the amount of overheal on your PoH, you may want to lean on Greater Heal/Heal more, or switch up your raid groups for PoH range. VuhDo has a "range check" before casting PoH, something you might want to try. Also, eight Flash Heals seems high for Shannox, can you precast GH on tank instead? Running at just over 4% Haste (before raid buffs) can be scary if you are trying to land a fast GH/PoH, if you like PoH spam add Haste and work on controlling overheals.

Not sure where i heard this, probably on EJ, but unless something like 40% of your healing comes from shields, which im assuming it wont considering your WoL data, then go for haste. BC you find yourself running out of mana, i would run with crit>haste>mastery considering your use of POH and mana complaint. Switch to inner will and focus on using PW:S only to keep rapture up and emergencies. POH overheal is absolutely fine, however 60% is a little high. If youre interested go to the world of logs site and look up top disc healers on high intensity fights such as beth or lord rhyolith and look and their spell usage. youll see POH overheal at approximately 40% with very high crit ratings. Of course there are multiple ways to play disc and i realize many guilds do have discs that stack mastery however these are usually 25 man guilds. Crit scales very well with POH, not quite as well as haste but a very close second. For your gear IMO you should be just fine with a haste build or 50%haste/crit. Quit casting so many shields and flash heals, penance was also low on the list and should be cast on CD, or about. The amount of mana gained from inner will, will surpass the benefit of inner fire with your current gear IMO.

Your gear is good enough to go with a mostly haste build. Monitor your t12 2 set buff in addition to aforementioned changes and you should be fine.

You're running with a Shaman and Druid, PoH really shouldn't even factor into your healing that much. The only cases where it should still be useful are Beth and Domo. What stat is best varies a lot on your playstyle and group comp, I lean very heavily on PW:S, especially for important phases/moments on fights and so I stack mastery.

The OP is pulling most of the weight. based off the WoL data, i gather most of the obligation still lies under raid healing. of course this is merely the nature of the healing on the two of the three fights with available data.

If you want to increase hps and have the mana to do it then haste is your best bet by a long way.
If you want to increase hps and increase hpm then crit still beats mastery by a fairly significant amount (I would argue it's significant enough to negate the 'RNG' argument against crit.)

I would be interested to see what happens with haste+spirit vs crit+mastery though. - anyone done the math?

If you want to increase hps and have the mana to do it then haste is your best bet by a long way.
If you want to increase hps and increase hpm then crit still beats mastery by a fairly significant amount (I would argue it's significant enough to negate the 'RNG' argument against crit.)

That is a good point, and I guess I have been doing it wrong. I'm gonna try haste>crit and crit>mastery and see how they fare.

Thank you for the input. I would really like to see some of your log's if you are willing to post.

---------- Post added 2011-08-08 at 02:11 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Kelesti

Stacking mastery benefits shield, which is also "at the expense of mana", and to a greater extent than increasing your haste on gear.

Crit> Mastery gives you a bitter chance to pop double DA, haste is the king stat for Discipline. Because in aoe fights as you said, people take damage more than once. Having them live to survive multiple casts is better than a trickle of a shield increase that a sneeze doesn't even get absorbed through.

And if you're worried about running OoM, well... stop playing terribly?

So I took the advise of many and looked up some of the top Disc priests on WOL(10 man). So far, I am seeing all of them reforge haste and crit to mastery. Now I understand that some of the best disc priest might not run logs, so before I believe what you are saying, can you please post your logs? Are the top disc priest on logs wrong? With a few upgrades this last week and stacking mastery I was over 13K on shannox and 18K on Beth, ect (increase on all bosses). Those numbers seem pretty high for my gear levels compared to other disc priest. I guess i am just a little curious on why I am not seeing any disc priest in the top few positions stacking haste or crit. Humm. i will have to look into this more.

Take another look at the #1 priest you posted, this priest is running at 1600 ish spirit and raid buffed about 13% haste.Yes, this priest has high mastery and crit as well. IMO, what gives this priest the high heals is stacking all stats and giving up the spirit. Wish you had posted the WoL report as well, don't have the time ATM to look it up... How many healers were taken, and what other classes is this toon healing with, how much damage did the raid take, how fast was the kill?At the end of the day as a healer it is our goal to save lives, not win spots on WoL, but when it happens, cheers!

Thank you for the input. I would really like to see some of your log's if you are willing to post.

You can do fine with either haste or mastery, it doesn't matter too much as long as you are using a decent number of PW:S (which you have to for rapture anyway) and aren't running out of mana. Lately I've been haste/crit stacking but I've also stacked mastery in the past.

Really though, healer rankings have much less to do with stat priority than they do with things like how many healers you have (ie. it's pretty easy to rank while 2-healing) and how good your dps is, both in terms of getting out of fire and just killing the boss before damage starts ramping up too much.

Thank you for the input. I would really like to see some of your log's if you are willing to post.

---------- Post added 2011-08-08 at 02:11 PM ----------

So I took the advise of many and looked up some of the top Disc priests on WOL(10 man). So far, I am seeing all of them reforge haste and crit to mastery. Now I understand that some of the best disc priest might not run logs, so before I believe what you are saying, can you please post your logs? Are the top disc priest on logs wrong? With a few upgrades this last week and stacking mastery I was over 13K on shannox and 18K on Beth, ect (increase on all bosses). Those numbers seem pretty high for my gear levels compared to other disc priest. I guess i am just a little curious on why I am not seeing any disc priest in the top few positions stacking haste or crit. Humm. i will have to look into this more.

Examples of beth logs are:

#1 disc priest on Beth and ranked in the top 5 on others

#3 disc priest on Beth

According to armory neither of these guys have downed Beth hardmode. I was originally looking to see what fights they were probably working on as this would be an indicator of why they're geared stat-wise. Its important to note that stats change depending on the fight and theres a strong likelyhood theyre no longer reforged for that fight unless its very recently added entry to WoL.

In normal the fight is quite different. 50% less damage goes out so one less healer can be taken, which means a shorter fight which could me a different healing strategy. If you out gear a fight, theres multiple ways you could mess with it to get the highest WoL entry.

In Shannti's case, he/she was doing 2/3 more healing than the next healer in the raid, with only 2 healers present. only 8.5% of total healing comes from PW:S, suggesting at non mastery build at the time. Divine Aegis and POH make up approx 60% of the healing. The fight lasts 356 seconds when the average for this fight is 407 seconds on 10N.